Here, in a cozy, one-room cabin that he built, William Elliott Whitmore stands surrounded by homemade shelves that teem with books and LPs, holding a cup of coffee and looking out a picture window that overlooks the paddock where his horse, Jed, and his mule, Lucky 13, butt heads and snort in the wild grasses.
Within the hour, he’ll be out feeding his chickens, or pitching in to help with chores at Grandma Whitmore’s beautiful old farmhouse not 200 feet away. She ever is the matriarch and family historian around here, with a background as colorful as a character in a Howard Hawks movie.
“There’s a barn around here that was built in 1866 by a long-ago relative on my mom’s side with lumber that he floated down the Mississippi himself,” Whitmore says via phone from his Iowa roost during a lengthy shit-shooting session. We were supposed to meet in person, but a blizzard left him snowed in for nearly a week.
“It might be the oldest building in the county still standing,” he says. “Everywhere I look, there are fingerprints of my forebears. This area is my spiritual center. I’m just fortunate to be its steward during my time here on Earth. It will be here forever; I’m just passing through.”
This probably sounds idyllic if you’re one of this country’s innumerable city dwellers, looking through your kitchen windows at overstuffed dumpsters, brick walls, and parked cars, or a suburbanite surveying your property while a familiar set of golden arches looms large on the horizon, keeping constant watch over a buzzing hive of interstates, strip malls, and outlet stores. And in a very real sense, it is. Like your dad always told you growing up, there’s something to be said for a life of hard work.
But Whitmore didn’t grow up much different than the rest of us, spending his afternoons in town with his cousin and his brother, skateboarding and raising hell while Black Flag and Public Enemy cassettes played in the background.
On that same stretch of road where the local cops used to tell them to “move it along,” there’s now a tattoo parlor run by a friend of the family. Here, everybody is family.
And though the meeting places of rural Iowa might now be the tattoo parlor or the sports bar up the road, that mythic American Mayberry sense of knowing your fellow man and looking out for your neighbor is alive and well here — something put to the test this past summer when the whole town came together to save the local watering hole from the swiftly encroaching floodwaters of North America’s biggest river.
But don’t let him fool you. Though a farm-boy heart beats proudly in his chest, William Elliott Whitmore has toured the world with nothing more than a banjo and a guitar for company. He learned French for an enthusiastic crowd in Paris, and has traveled from Copenhagen to Amsterdam to London, making all the stops between.
“I remember playing my first show in Rome,” he says. “I’d never been to Italy. As kind of an icebreaker, I told the crowd how I’d recently played a show in Rome, Georgia, which was this cool little town where I’d been booked at an abandoned train depot that everybody said was haunted. They got a kick out of that.”
No matter where he sets up shop, each time he strolls on stage, tips his hat, raises his glass, shares an anecdote, and lets loose his ancient, soulful moan of a voice (which sounds every bit as old as that barn his ancestors built), every pair of eyes in the room is immediately fixated on him.
He has played with similar-minded acts like Against Me! and Lucero, as well as long-standing metal stalwarts Clutch and seemingly incongruous bands like Converge, Lightning Bolt, and Girls Against Boys. He even spent a string of dates opening for The Pogues.
But no matter the room, whatever the conversation, William Elliott Whitmore will stop it dead in its tracks for 45 minutes to an hour, with songs about his family, personal triumph, history, and the natural world.
And though he’s traveled from one corner of the globe to the other, belting out song after song at venues ranging from small house parties to crowds of thousands, the road to the stage wasn’t always the obvious one.
“I’ve been writing songs and stories since I was a little kid,” Whitmore says. “But it never seemed like something I could actually do for a living. I never expected that. I thought that I’d end up working in a factory or farming. And I’ve done those things. But everybody has that moment in their life where the fates align, and they suddenly realize, ‘Hey, I want to do this with my life. This has meaning to me. Fortunately for me, I was holding a banjo at that time.”
Outside of an obvious gift for song, as well as a voice that recalls scratchy Dock Boggs and Charlie Poole 78s as easily as it does the powerhouse soul of Percy Sledge and Bobby Bland‘s 1950s A-sides, it’s his thematic focus on family, roots, and nature that gives his music the sort of straightforward authenticity that many of his peers lack.
There are no break-up songs, no self-pity, and no self-indulgent musings. Even his songs about death have an ultimately positive vibe, treating it as just another part of the circle of life.
“I was raised to believe that it’s the things that go wrong that make you a stronger person,” Whitmore says. “You have to do something good to counteract the evil out there.”
It’s this punk-rock tenacity that makes him fundamentally different from nearly every other roots act pounding the pavement on the circuit today. He embraces the same kind of “brother’s keeper,” do-or-die attitude that would have you reaching down in the mosh pit to help a fallen comrade to his feet.
Lyrically and spiritually, Whitmore’s roots lie more in political hip-hop groups like The Coup and DC hardcore originators Minor Threat than old-time favorite Uncle Dave Macon.
“Honestly, one of my biggest influences lately has been Boots Riley from The Coup,” he says. “He knows how to write some seriously good political songs without beating you over the head with his beliefs or naming names. And there’s always something to be said for the classics — Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson. But you don’t ever try to ‘be’ them; you just apply what they did to what it is that you want to do.”
While still in his late teens, Whitmore moved to Iowa City, ground zero for a booming local underground hardcore/DIY punk scene in the early-to-mid-1990s.
“I moved into town, made some friends, and next thing you know they’re taking me into a church basement to see a hardcore punk show,” he recalls. “I knew nothing of the DIY underground scene. It was a mind-blowing revelation, seeing all these kids who were putting on their own legitimate shows and pressing up their own records, like Dischord had been doing for years, but right here in Iowa, in action.”
But even with all that raucous music going on in the basements and back rooms of Iowa City, roots music was and is the omnipresent soundtrack of the rural Midwest. Every truck stop, roadside dive, and Eagle’s Hall worth a damn from Ohio to Wisconsin to the Mississippi River Valley is ready to scoot boots, tear firmly in beer.
“There’s certain music that has a timeless quality to it,” Whitmore says. “I wanted to make music like that. So I retrofitted the three-chord punk stuff that I was already familiar with and made it work for me in the way that I wanted it to.”
In Iowa City, he discovered kindred spirits in the indie-punk outfit Ten Grand. They brought him to the attention of the label with which they had been working, Chicago-based Southern Records, the US division of Southern Records UK, whose founder John Loder was inextricably linked with the original wave of UK political punks — Crass, Subhumans, Crucifix, and Antisect — and Ian MacKaye of Dischord, based out of Washington, DC.
Southern released Whitmore’s gorgeous, sparse debut, Hymns for the Hopeless, in 2003, and after six years, three highly acclaimed full-length records, and one EP, he’s now signed a deal with Los Angeles-based Anti- Records, home to such legendary artists as Tom Waits, Mavis Staples, Merle Haggard, Nick Cave, and the late Porter Wagoner (in addition to the aforementioned Coup and modern hardcore experimentalists such as The Locust). Whitmore’s latest, and first for the label, Animals in the Dark, was released in February of 2009.
“The songs on my first three albums were generally autobiographical, or stories that had been passed to me from other people,” he says. “My challenge for myself this time around was to push my writing and make it more political without dating things or outright naming names.
“You build yourself into this little self-made box of restrictions, and you realize that you have to make things work with the tools you’ve allowed yourself while peeking over the edge of that box from time to time to keep things interesting. There’s a lot going on in the world today. The important thing to me was how to say things poetically while still conveying how pissed off you are with the government.”
This discontentment is obvious on Animals in the Dark, and spending the last six years touring the US and Europe made its impressions on Whitmore, who recognizes it in his lyrics.
“I came to realize that sitting in bars and talking to people in Slovenia or Italy was not so different from sitting in bars and talking to people in Lee County, Iowa,” he says. “People have problems with their governments, problems with their jobs. But they still wake up every day, go about their work, and knock back a couple of beers at night.
“You begin to realize that these things are global realities, and they’ve been happening since the beginning of time. And at the end of the day, we’re all just people going about our business.”
Perhaps this idea of ongoing political push-and-shove is best exemplified in the floorboard-rattling rave-up “Old Devils,” which deals with timeless tensions: war, religion, wrongful imprisonment, and the sway of power:
“They tell me there’s a war without an end / The old devils are at it again / They died by the millions — women, children, and men / The old devils are at it again.”
“It’s always been there,” Whitmore continues. “Poor people and rich people have been fighting forever, probably since two cavemen picked up clubs and went at it. You have to step back a bit and realize that things aren’t really any better or worse now than they’ve ever been. Sometimes you’re up, and sometimes you’re down; you’ve just gotta make the most of the time that you have.”
Although the songs on Animals in the Dark veered away from Whitmore’s personal history, the recording of the album remained a family affair in and of itself. The album was recorded at Flat Black Studios in Iowa City, which is run by Whitmore’s cousin Luke Tweedy, an accomplished producer and musician in his own right (his Iowa City-based outfit FT [The Shadow Government] bangs out the finest in anti-political noise). Whitmore and Tweedy built the studio from scratch, piece by piece. When it was done, they set to work building the pieces for Animals in the Dark.
“It took over a year to record,” Whitmore says. “It was a brand-new experience and a luxury to be able to take as much time as we wanted to tweak everything until it came together exactly as intended, and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.”
It’s safe to say that William Elliott Whitmore’s fans won’t be disappointed either. The results of their labor are ten of his most accomplished songs to date, spreading wider his range of influences oh-so carefully, from the comfortable nod to classic hip hop with war-like chants of “we don’t need no water” on album opener “Mutiny,” to the soul-inflected silver linings of “Hard Times” and the touching optimism of a life well lived on album closer “A Good Day to Die.”
This is classic American songwriting at its finest in 2009, much of which probably would have been just as relevant in 1909 and undoubtedly will be in 2109.
“I’m just adding my drop into the ever-expanding music pool and trying to add to the lexicon in my own way,” Whitmore says. “I don’t intend to sway anyone’s opinion — just present mine, as is, warts and all. And if it happens to make someone think about something a little differently, that’s great. That means I’ve done my part to make my drop count.”